a scritti politti record review from fifteen years ago. not sure where (or if) published.

Scritti Politti

White Bread and Black Beer

Rough Trade/Shock

I never set much store by record labels, although I suppose there might be something in the notion that a certain culture at certain record labels give a certain something to certain artists. And this could perhaps explain why the new Scritti Politti album – the group’s umpteenth but their first back on their basically-original label Rough Trade – is their best since their first album, Songs to Remember.

The above paragraph was so freakin’ complicated, I didn’t want to have to add in the additional information that the group is not really a group, just a guy, or perhaps the guy, Green Gartside, this just-pretty-much-a genius, at home doing some recording on equipment that, if it doesn’t exactly constitute a home studio, is at least enough recording equipment to fit into his home. The album is sparse, fragile, slipperier’n an oily rag, and glows like a gold brick. I think it’s a masterpiece.

Scritti last bothered the charts in 1984 with ‘Wood Beez’, a song that was surely a hit because it was an early example of a record no-one, including its perpetrators probably, could ever sing along to (so you had to buy it). T(he)y had a pretty prominent near-hit in the ‘91 with a minor Beatles song, ‘She’s a Woman’, in which Shabba Ranks often popped in and said ‘Shabba!’ (or did I dream that?). And then there was a decent album called Anomie and Bonhomie a few years ago which I haven’t listened to since it came out.

Now, Green appears to have a beard and has become funnier than ever. Even as slight a slice of funk as ‘Throw’ is a hoot (‘you could throw a party and maybe I’ll be there’, he sings, which amuses me, anyway). Green, like Jon Michell, likes Marc Bolan, and like Jon Michell, it shows (just listen to ‘After Six’, forget the strange godbotherer references, and imagine it speeded up – it’s Jesus in a Jeepster). He also – you’ll remember he once covered the Beatles – likes, or likes to sound like, Paul McCartney; that final track, ‘Robin Hood’, one of the best, would have fit perfectly on any McCartney album except, um, Run Devil Run. There’s a crazy, slightly creepy song called ‘Mrs Hughes’ which is kind of Simon and Garfunkel and scary but totally brilliant.

Can’t recommend this record highly enough.

By the way (this is me in 2021 now), I still stand by this review, uninterestingly written as it may be. I see that in the original I slightly erred in the record's title - it's White Bread Black Beer, that's not particularly important. I would like to hear this album again because who knows what's happened to my CD of it. I think it might have come out on vinyl but I'm trying to keep a lid on my vinyl purchases if at all possible. Instead I'm spending all my dosh on books and films, what a prat. And ornaments and car repair. And food. And, you know, bills. 

this post has nothing to do with my cats or any cats, but these days I feel the need to provide a picture of something just to lull you into forgetting how dumbed down everything is by pictures of for instance cats

Not that things aren't dumbed down, way down, enough here.

So I have interlinked dichotomies re: health, pain, fitness, weightloss etc which form a kind of ker-plunk situation probably not uncommon in the almost-56-year-old-men demographic. I have the pain, which I have whinged about previously; I finally made it to the doctor’s on Wednesday unless it was Thursday and she figured I had a slightly (maybe she didn’t say slightly) inflamed (or similar term) vertebrae. The trick, she says, is to strengthen the muscles around it so as to keep it in place and not sticking out hurting me. She recommends physio and that is I suppose something I have to do. But in the meantime, I just joined the gym again after a year away and no bull, I hate it but I am really keen to start going there again on a very regular basis. But I don’t want to, you know, hear a pinging sound and see that disc bouncing out onto the wall. As mentioned previously (thanks for caring) yes I can maintain 10 000 steps a day and my daily average for 2021 is in fact slightly over and I aim to keep that going. Sorry to bring it up but I know that is what diaries are for, and if you want to read my diary, well gee whiz you get what you get because, news just in, it is what it is.

 

Speaking of which in the last week or so I have had password hell with two media orgs I subscribe to, Slate Plus (longtime member) and Crikey (recent convert). Slate Plus has always been a bit iffy with proper labelling of its podcasts on its site, so you kind of take a stab in the dark whether you get the ‘Plus’ version (longer with a coda) or the regular version which has ads. I can’t stand the ads. Of course, being in Australia they almost never have anything at all to do with me, things I couldn’t buy even if I was inclined. So it is galling to have to listen to them. But now when I try to access the ‘Plus’ version of the podcasts (or ‘Dear Prudence’, the text advice column, which frankly I am addicted to) I have to go through a rigmarole of logging in and then the humiliation of being admitted to something I should not have log in for but at the same time being told that I could not, at this point, make the transaction. UGH.

 

Crikey has just been sending me on a change-your-password-thanks-your-password-change-is-successful-oh-who-are-you-change-your-password trek which sucks and also as some would say blows. OK I managed this one by complaining to them (sorry, I would have complained to you first but I’ve been busy) and they sent me what I assume is a generic password for Crikey which I’m just going to keep using until I can’t anymore. 

 

If you know anything about the two above you’ll know that they are left-leaning online journalism sites from the US and Australia respectively. I have been a Slate adherent for 8 or 9 years. I bit the bullet and took on Crikey a few months ago and while at first I was doubtful (perhaps, I now think, not much was happening over summer) it is paying off in terms of in-depth actual news, political news, which I enjoy. My leftist world view was created by my parents being intelligent from the mid-1960s and exposing me to the appropriate views, proof, rhetoric. I was leftwing before I knew what it meant, like supporting a football team, but when I found out what it meant I realised it was appropriate to what I actually believed, lol. I remember a long series of arguments with my Auburn South Primary School friend John Parncutt about Liberal vs Labor at a time when I could barely often recall (those two words do seem kind of similar – was that deliberate on the part of the Liberals?) which word stood for my alignment. John would ask me why I thought Labor was the best party to lead the nation and fuck it, I was ten, I had no idea of anything at all, of course, except that Enid Blyton was exciting and ABBA were grand. Looking back I now suspect that had I actually posited anything like a reasonable response he would have shat and died, because he certainly (in my memory anyway, maybe blocked it out) didn’t have a policy position on anything except that the Liberal Party was his family’s football team. In any case, I have always essentially voted Labor (yeah, I have actually often voted Greens, particularly in Broadmeadows where it feels like Labor’s so rusted on anything that puts a bit of a sad old damp firework under it might be useful) and, unimaginative as it might seem, I kind of like them. I have no special idealism and I don’t even, really, care about people above everything (I care about people I care about, but I also care about animals I care about, I also, I am sure I’ve mentioned this, question the whole notion of a world-view concocted as though what you/I care for really matters). 

 

Last night I recorded two hours of lecture to my computer to be released unto students on Tuesday. By the end I was very croaky and in that weird state – I have to say it is almost pleasurable – of feeling like I’d run out of vocabulary, just a general exhaustion of verbality. My lectures, by the way, are not written so much as commentary to a series of assembled slides. I try to have a summary at the beginning, but I tend not to have a summing up, and usually that’s because I like to keep things open-ended. I don’t believe there is a neat ending, and to imagine one is to cut yourself off intellectually. Everything bleeds into everything else. I spend hours telling students that mid-century modernism* is still heavily affected by some of the concerns of the late 19^th century, and then I say ‘so to wrap that up, no-one is prey to their formative influences anymore, year zero came along and the reset was entirely successful’ - ?!

 

Today I have to write another lecture, almost completely from scratch (there will be some callbacks to the first week of lectures – this is for undergraduate students who are not dumb but I think do need a little bit of hand-holding, JUST NO SPOONFEEDING, early on). It will be great, I have good material, but the composition of it will be arduous. Fortunately, as I always tell everyone in my usual smug way, I really enjoy my job. 

 

*By the way it occurred to me while I was talking about that that the mid-21^st century is looming on the horizon; a book I was reading for review this week which claimed to be about ‘mid-century’ began its narrative in the 19-teens.